Possessed’s 1985 debut, Seven Churches, rewired the brains of an entire generation of metalheads. Opening with its now iconic Exorcist-inspired intro, the album combines Jeff Becerra’s howled meditations on Satanism and mortality with tremolo picking and charging tempos for a sound that still feels astonishingly savage decades later. At the time, Possessed belonged to the Bay Area thrash scene, yet its music presaged the rise of death metal at the end of the ’80s. The band dropped just one more album, 1986’s far more thrashy Beyond the Gates, before breaking up at the peak of its powers. Becerra formed a new Possessed in the late 2000s, eventually releasing a long-overdue third album, 2019’s Revelations of Oblivion, that successfully channels the group’s original darkness.